In most of Joseph Roth’s novels published in the 1920s the First World War, which he himself had experienced as a catastrophic event, forms the background to the tragic stories of many returnees. In their vain search for a place in post-war society, they always come up against the cynical mechanisms of violence of a social system aiming at radical repression. In The Rebellion (1924) the unhappy experience of the former good soldier and war invalid Andreas Pum, who desperately rebels against the inscrutable strategies of social exclusion that affect him, shows that the war is by no means over for him. As his bleak struggle against the “pillars of society”, in which he had otherwise always believed, unfortunately has nothing heroic about it, the epic gesture typical of old narratives glorifying war gives way to a sober, journalistic style that reflects and highlights the moral misery of the society that emerged from the World War I.